Former Trump Cabinet secretary Ben Carson called out hyperbolic and hypocritical Democrats including Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and President Joe Biden over specious claims that Georgia‘s election-integrity law was a throwback to racist pre-civil-rights policies.
During a Fox News interview on Tuesday, the former head of Housing and Urban Development said Omar’s over-the-top rhetoric linking Georgia’s law to South African Apartheid was beyond the pale.
“It’s so disgusting that people would try to take something as horrible as Apartheid and try to equate it to this and not to explain it,” said Carson, who is also a a former world-renowned brain surgeon, presidential candidate.
“This is the worst part,” he continued. “They make these accusations, they all get on the bandwagon and they will not sit down and explain it.”
Despite calls from Georgia Democrats not to boycott the state over its election law because doing so would disproportionately harm minority communities, Omar pressed forward by encouraging it.
.@Ilhan: “Our hope is that this boycott will result in changes in the law because we understand that when you restrict people’s ability to vote, you create a democracy that isn’t fully functioning for all of us.” https://t.co/9df1AhJHYY pic.twitter.com/3K4MG4uQ2l
— The Hill (@thehill) April 4, 2021
Carson, who grew up impoverished in Detroit but rose to preeminence due to hard work and a steadfast adherence to conservative, Christian values, has often been a vocal critic of the Left’s race-baiting rhetoric.
“We’re not each other’s enemies,” he said during the Fox interview. “Trying to create black victimhood and white guilt does not lead us to a good place.
He added that Democrats who had invoked an oft-repeated “Jim Crow” talking point to claim the Georgia law was akin to poll taxes and literacy tests were clearly uninformed.
The laws were historically were used to prevent lower-class voting in Southern states after the Civil War, as part of the racist system that also imposed segregation and supported racial violence such as lynchings.
By contrast, Democrats including President Joe Biden have falsely claimed that the Georgia law would deprive voters of being provided water while waiting in line to vote.
“This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” Biden said in a recent press conference.
The bill, in reality, bans partisan activist groups from using food and drink giveaways within the polling place boundaries to effectively buy votes.
“It’s very sad that some of our leaders, particularly the leader of the free world would be involved in disseminating information that is untrue,” Carson said in reaction.
“I wonder if these people understand history,” he continued. “Do they know what Jim Crow laws actually were? They were a mechanism to diminish the rights that many blacks had gained during Reconstruction and they enforced segregation. The things that people went through in those days were horrendous.”
The laws, driven by Southern Democrats, remained in effect until the passage of Republican-led civil-rights legislation in the 1950s and ’60s.
Ironically, in the presidential primary, Biden boasted of his ability to work with some of the latter-day segregationists during his early days in the Senate, drawing mild rebukes from his own party members including future vice president Kamala Harris.
Carson also mused about the hypocrisy of virtue-signaling companies like Delta and American airlines, which demand the utmost in security screenings of their own passengers but shrugged off the need for reasonable, common-sense verification measures when voting.
“I find it rather funny that the CEO of Delta and American Airlines would be saying that requiring voter I.D. is racist,” he noted. “Trying to get on a Delta flight or American Airlines flight without an official I.D: You’re not going to get on there.”
